


Nobody

by lokilickedme



Series: Taliesin [1]
Category: Andrew Hozier-Byrne (Musician), Celtic Mythology, Hozier - Fandom, Irish Mythology, Nobody - Hozier (Song), Wasteland Baby (album) - Hozier
Genre: Celtic Deities, Celtic Mythology & Folklore, Explicit Language, F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Sex, Irish Deities, Musical References, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-01-31 21:37:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18599884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lokilickedme/pseuds/lokilickedme
Summary: When a Celtic deity is cast out of the pantheon by the angry gods, his beautiful music - which keeps the gods alive - dies with him. Unable to live without his songs despite the light of truth they cast on them, the Tuatha Dé Danann allow Taliesin to be resurrected as a mortal by the faith and adoration of his followers, a global throng of loyals gained through the human world's need to worship celebrity.Brought back in a neverending series of random incarnations, Taliesin falls into fame through his music and the effect it has on the humans he now lives among. But as a mortal he's a bit hapless and accident-prone, so a second deity, his lover from the Fae realm, is sent to follow him through his many lives, guiding him toward greatness while nurturing his gentle soul.In this incarnation Taliesin has rebooted after a fatal accident - orchestrated by a godly assassin to halt progress on a new song condemning the deities who cast him out - and has returned even more determined to continue calling them out on their wickedness and its effect on the modern religions of the world.  But first he's got plans for a certain group of angels...Based on lyrics from NOBODY, from the album WASTELAND BABY by Hozier





	Nobody

 

 

 

_You know it's twelve o'clock in Soho, baby_  
_It's gin o'clock where I wake up, I don't know_  
_I think about you though, everywhere I go_  
_And I've done everything and I've been everywhere, you know  
But I've had no love like your love_

 

 

"Angels, Tal?  Really?"

He smiles sheepishly, a look he's mastered over the millennia.  He's a trickster god, a sheepish look is standard apparel for them.

"I couldn't help myself."

Typical.  Taliesin has always had a weakness for beautiful things and this incarnation of himself is no exception.  Angels are right up his alley, though the wings on this particular set of heavenly bodies were more glitter and sequins than feathers and bone.  He couldn't be bothered to care.  They were lovely and sweet and attentive to his own scrubby brand of loveliness and sweetness, which seems just a bit more shallow and harmless this time around - and if there's one thing he's always responded to it's the fawning attention of beauty, whether it be his own or that of another creature.

It was going to get him in trouble if I didn't watch over him a little more closely.  A misguided step off a particularly high stage and a snapped neck from a messy landing had rebooted him once again.  And once again, he was back as the same folk rock god who had dominated his last dozen or so reincarnations.  He always seemed to reset to the same place each time now, the memory of him in the minds of all who knew him still intact save for the knowledge of his latest untimely demise.  And that misguided step was no doubt orchestrated with the intention of zapping his memory of the song he was writing, the one he said would bring light to the dark truths of the pantheon.

They just couldn't leave him be.

But he couldn't stop messing with them either, and so the inter-realm slap match continued.  This time they'd sent Phylesius to do him in, I was sure of it - the method had the assassin god's handprints all over it - but thankfully someone somewhere held his place for him until he reinhabited his human form a day later, no worse for the wear but with a distinctly stiff neck.

Nobody ever said the gods weren't halfway fair in their dealings with deities they liked.  They'd always loved Taliesin.

And so had I.

Though we were lovers in our own realm, we were never faithful to one another in the sense that mortals are familiar with.  Deities have a thing for free love and Tal was such a lovely creature with such boundless capacity for passionate affection that I never felt any need to espouse him.  He would have done, had I ever asked it of him.  But I didn't, and though he shared his love freely with any creature of the realm who sought his attentions, his love - his _deepest_ love, the truest part of him - was always kept for me.

"But Victoria's Secret?  Aren't they responsible for ninety percent of the dysmorphophobia in this realm?  Why would you - "

His green eyes are trained intently on me, a playful grin twitching at the corners of his soft lips.  As always, he's blissfully unaware of the mortals' problems.

"Alright."  No sense in digging for an argument - he is, as always, an imperturbable garden of no fucks given.  "So how many of them?"

He shrugs and swings his long legs off the table where they're propped, boots and all.  No affinity for mortal manners this time around; I make a note to myself to teach him a few before his reputation is sullied by the uncouth tendencies he's come back with.

 

_Honey, when you warm the bed on Wednesday_  
_It's suicide Tuesday back in LA_

 

"I was so fuckin' stoned, jaysus.  Best damn X I ever had but goddamn I was half scared I'd drop dead."  He rubs his face with his palms.  "Six.  I think.  I'm not good with numbers."

"No, you never were."

" _So_ goddamned stoned.  Not even sure that was ecstasy.  Coke and aspartame maybe."  The pained scowl in memoriam of the hangover shifts quickly to a lewd little smirk.  "Two going down on me, one behind me, fingering two others and I have no clue what the last one was doing.  There may have been a forty-four involved somewhere.  All I know is my mouth was free because I was singing Take Me to Fucking Mass or something."  The lyrical lilt to his voice, the only evidence of his origin, puts that perpetually amused little tip onto the end of his words - but there's an exhaustion under it and I know he needs an authoritative tug on his reins to settle the self destructive hedonism that sometimes follows him into life.  "Take me to the goddamned bathroom more like."

"She was probably taking pictures.  This is going to be all over the tabloids, you realize that don't you?"

"I've never been in the tabloids before, have I?"

"Briefly.  It was nipped _quickly_ in the bud because your manager, bless her wise soul, refused to let you get into a contract with that horrific bitch."

"I don't remember that."

"No, of course you don't."  I draw in a deep breath, but I can't bring myself to let out a sigh of resignation.  Taliesin, for all his sweet softness and gentle nature, is a troublesome child at the best of times.  "Do you remember your name?"

"Andrew."

"Good.  Do you remember the rest of it?"

"Of course I do, I've been here what - two weeks?  Three?"

"Five days.  So you remember rebooting again."

"Yeah.  Fucking Phylesian."  He rubs at the side of his neck where no doubt the worst of the shattered vertebrae are housed.  They always let him come back, but with a distinct muscle memory of whatever offed him the last time.  Call it an advance warning for the next offense, which we all know there will be.  I can't imagine what a broken neck must feel like.

It's not the worst they've done to him, not by far.

"Yeah, fucking Phylesian.  Just watch your step next time, you're still too clumsy to fully pass.  The mortals are still buying the Forest God Fae Child image but if you don't learn how to get all your legs going in the same direction on a consistent basis they're going to start wondering if you've got something wrong with you."

"But I _am_ a Forest God Fae Child."

"You know how the hide in plain sight ploy works."  I reach out and pull his hand away from his neck to kiss his long, delicate fingers.  So much talent in those elegant things.  His fingertips aren't calloused yet this time, still soft and sensitive.  His whole body is new, a perfect duplicate of his last one, minus the wear and tear.  His smile turns warm.  "Are you going to finish that song?"

"You bet I am."

"Why?  You keep poking at the pantheon and they're just going to keep poking back.  Except each time _they_ poke you end up deceased and rotting in a bog somewhere."

"I like bogs."

"Of course you do.  Just - "  The frustrated sigh finally escapes me, and Taliesin tugs me gently down onto his lap, those long, strong fingers softly caressing the side of my face.  A memory, not entirely unwelcome, of our life in the Echolein shivers through me.

So much passion in him.  So much tenderness.

So much blatant disregard for not pissing off the upper level gods.

" - just take it easy on the calling out stuff, okay?  They're not playing around these days."

"Neither am I."

"I beg to differ on that one, my sweet mossy boy."  I tickle a fingertip across the whisker covered cleft in his chin, watch the mischievous sparkle light up his earthy green eyes.  "All you _do_ is play."

"It's all games my lover."

"Until someone breaks a neck."

There's the slightest hint of a wince, the barely perceptible flinch of a muscle in his left cheek, and then his face falls to that gentle whisper of bliss that has been the visage of Taliesin, Celtic deity of song, since the dawn of the world.  He always remembers the pain of his death, that first one, the sentence passed on him by an angry assemblage of gods whose jealousy and rage was tempered - just barely - by the gentle likableness of the condemned.  I don't believe for a second they never regretted their actions against him, but I also know they will continue to do it again and again for however long he insists on shouting their sins to the universe.

Because even though Taliesin, Andrew, whatever he goes by on any given day, sings with the soft soulful beauty of the unearthly being he most definitely is...

...he just won't shut up about the damn gods and their shitty behavior.

But for now he's distracted by the dull thumping in the back of his skull that has nothing to do with a bunch of irritated Celtic deities and everything to do with whatever he swallowed or snorted or drank Thursday night, in competition with the warmly erotic memory of whatever his body got up to while his brain was blissfully elsewhere.

 

_And on the other side, why should we deny the truth_  
_We could have less to worry about, honey I won't lie to you_  
_But everything I do, I've had no love like your love_

 

"I wrote something new this morning."

His mouth is against my throat, soft and warmly damp with his breath, his tongue lazily touching my skin because he simply enjoys the taste of me, and his words whisper across my pulse in rhythm with it.  I know whatever he wrote isn't about me.  If it's not a poetically scathing condemnation of his masters cloaked in a clever essay about religious hypocrisy, it's likely to be about his other favorite subject, and that's got nothing to do with me yet.  Not this time.  He's only been alive in this body for five days.  We haven't had time to be together, his newly built but achingly familiar physical form is still a stranger to me.  But we have our memories, and to us it's only been a week since we lay twisted up in each other, the sweaty sheets tangling our legs, his impossibly wild hair covering my face and blowing gently with each breath I exhaled.  He died later that night, during a sound check at a new venue.  Two of the mortals saw it happen but their memories reset instantly, just like always.  And the following morning he was back, his left shoulder hitched up with a sharp indelible pain that was written off as a pinched nerve by those around him but that he remembered vividly as a shattered set of C3 and C4 vertebrae that had very effectively crushed his trachea, killing him not quite instantly enough.

They always chose horrifically uncomfortable demises for him.

And he always wrote horrifically uncomfortable edicts against them in reprisal, continuing the vicious cycle that would always be Taliesin and the Celtic Order.

It might be amusing to watch if the times he rebooted without his memories weren't so heartbreaking.

He'd been a simple child once, born without the ability to speak.  A wolf more than once, devoid of conscious thought and lacking in voice but full of human emotion that made him feral.  A musician who wrote beautifully and played miraculously but, tragically, couldn't sing.  A cryptid, glimpsed briefly and then lost to legend.  A man driven to self destructive insanity by the disjointed memory of a horrific death suffered at the hands of vengeful beings whose existence he had no memory of and that his mortal mind couldn't comprehend.  A genderless being with no compelling to love, and therefore no compelling to emote.  A woman once, murdered brutally at the hands of a man whose only ability to feel passion was in the crime of it.

The tragedy of Tal.  It was rarely easy on him.

So many incarnations he'd lived through.  And each time that it goes wrong, those occasional times when he accidentally comes back without the ability to give the gods what they want - the gift of his songs drifting through the thin filmy mist that separates them from this side - they simply end him.  He's no use to them if he can't give them their desired prize.  They end him and bring him back to try again, waiting until he opens his mouth and gives them that glorious voice before deciding if this time it's a life he can keep.

But they never let him keep it long, because that gift of his, that coveted sound that soothes them, always caresses itself around words that reveal the true nature of them.

They tolerate it for as long as they're able, and then another tragic accident befalls their songmaker to stop the bold unflinching accusation.  But they can't exist for long without the music that only he can make...and so he comes back from the soil they always reduce him to, hair wild and tangled with leaves and grass, skin scented heavily with the soaked in aroma of the cold clean dirt he's so freshly arisen from, eyes just a little more the color of the earth that has covered them each time he reopens them for that first shuddering blink of new life.

Sometimes though...sometimes they're too angry, they leave him for too long, and it takes the fervent prayers of his mortal worshipers to call him back.  It's then that he is at his most soulful, his most truthful, his most perfectly imperfect.  It's then that the whole world falls in love with him a little bit more, slowly and gently, his magic weaving itself into the souls of the masses as he lifts them to contented bliss with the witchcraft of his voice.

It's no wonder the gods hate him every bit as much as they love him.  His followers are myriad while theirs have all but died away, losing interest or simply forgetting them to the long empty hallways of time.

_Hozier,_ they've named him.  There is no meaning to that word in the mortal realm, but in the Echolein it means, simply, _storyteller_.

It suits him.

 

_At first chance I'd take the bed warmed by the body_  
_I once warmed my hands over a burning Maserati_  
_Still I've had no love like your love  
From nobody_

 

He smiles as he rolls over off me, pulling me up to sit astride his hips.  His body is thin but strong, delicate in all its lean spareness but holding in its long bones all the power of a fallen god that's never been forgotten.  It's the form he falls most comfortably into.

He'll live forever, in some form or another.  I find a sad bit of happiness in that.

He deserves to live forever.

Those big gentle hands that hold the technical magic of his music slide up to caress the sides of my face, thumbs stroking lightly over my cheekbones.  There's a bliss softening his expression and I know the pleasure he just took from my body is as familiar to him as the breath he's drawing into his lungs.  He's new again, but the shocking breathless jolt of painful ecstasy we found in each other, no matter how carnal and animalistic and raw it was, is the same joining of souls that it's always been.  I treasure each of our first times.  There have been so many.  I'm reborn soon after him when his sleeps are long, but the quick ones, like this one, leave me living to wait for his return.  During those usually brief lulls my body aches for him, and when he returns there's a deeply passionate reunion between us that's more about our eternal hearts reestablishing their grip on each other than it is about breathless moans and the crashing rush of orgasmic pleasure.

It's definitely about that too, but Taliesin and I have made love without our physical forms too many times to count - the bodies we inhabit are simply a pleasant afterthought.

But may the deities strike us dead if we ever deny how fucking _good_ it feels to get back together like this.

 

"Is it going to get you smited again?  You just got here, remember.  Give yourself time to hear the crowd roar at least once before you take a header into the orchestra pit again."

"Naw, I'm debuting that one at the big show.  I dare them to bitchslap me in front of that many people."

"The Odeon?"

He nods, distracted by the pencil in his hand.  It's not putting the words in his head onto the paper fast enough to suit him.  I know it's going to be a matter of mere seconds before he snaps the lead and throws it against the wall in frustration.  He needs a recording device wetwired into the right side of his brain sometimes.  "The show starts in twenty minutes and you're not dressed yet, baby."

He can't hear me.  He's lost in the words that are rushing around in his head, crashing into each other, creating disarray and mayhem that I know he'll somehow manage to sort into such profound beauty you would never guess they hadn't just formed in his mouth as pure perfection, waiting to be gifted to the world's ears.  It's a messy amalgamation of thought and creation and effort that hurts him, sometimes deeply.  His thought processes are mangled, miswired.  He looks up and I see it in his eyes.  He's somewhere else with the song he's writing, and he won't come back until it's released him.  His symbiotic relationship with his music has never been more obvious.

It releases him, then he releases it.  It needs him to exist.  He needs it for the same reason.

I get up to answer the urgent knocking at the door, doing the job I've been resurrected to do.  I watch over this awkward creature while he stumbles through his current life long enough to create what longs for creation.  I do my best to keep him from exposing the truth of himself to the world.  I help him be _Andrew_ as convincingly as possible while Taliesin is screaming in the dark to be let out.

 

I watch that night from the audience like I always do.  I'm sometimes acknowledged as his female by the mortals, though most of the time I stay on the sidelines, in the half shadows, letting him shine without anyone knowing about me.  I'm not here for the glory of the spotlight, it's never suited me.  That's his.  I'm here for one purpose only, and the calm that has settled over his face and taken the anxiety out of his soft green eyes is the confirmation I need that I'm serving that purpose.  When he takes the stage that night it's all over him, the contentment in being alive, the comfort he so often can't find shackled in that unwieldy body he's been given.  He's _happy_.  And as he closes his eyes and the auditorium lights up with the soft glow of a thousand cigarette lighters and cellphone flashlights, that voice, that silky growling alto that once echoed so comfortingly through the fairy-lit halls of the Echolein, fills the massive room with words that only he and I - and six Victoria's Secret runway models - understand.

 

_I've been fed gold by sweet fools in Abu Dhabi_  
_And I've danced real slow with Rockettes on dodgy molly_  
_But I've had no love like your love..._

_I'm nobody_

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> For Alana, who fell in with me.
> 
> (Lyrics from NOBODY, property of Andrew Hozier-Byrne)


End file.
